tech-talk 5 - Building our own contact-mic
We are recording sound fx and percussion for our new tracks at the moment. We took this opportunity to make something we were thinking about for quite some time already. We built our own contact mic. Actually it is pretty easy and cheap and we have no clue why we didn't do this before. We bought the following: - a piezo plate - 0,40 EUR - an instrument cabel 1m - 1,09 EUR - a jack plug - 1,39 EUR So we paid 2,88 EUR in total and I am not talking about net prices! Everything was available at our local electronic market (Conrad), so I am pretty sure you will find it at Best Buy and everywhere.
I totally forgot what kind of fun it is to solder things together. It is not only those nice little silver balls that melt and get hard again all the time, it is a fantastic smell! Our piezo plate was a very small though and we had problems attaching the ground of the cable to the edge of the metal, but in the end it worked. We tried, and wonder what, it worked at the first try. We taped the mic to a rainmaker and it instantly sounded like a "thundermaker" through the amp. We definitely will have a lot of fun using it!